I'd like to rip the titles from a bunch of word documents. All the CLI tools I've tried for converting .doc to text lose the title... but Abiword's conversion to RTF preserves it, eg:

$ abiword --to=rtf something.doc

gives something.rtf, a text-encoded file that includes the title.

So far so good but I need one line of the file, writing it seems very wasteful. (eg if I could get the output to go to stdout, I'd run this with Python's subprocess, capture it and apply a regex to get a list of titles).

But, unless I'm missing something, Abiword CLI tool doesn't seem to be set up to output to standard out. You can either:

specify output format, giving original file name + new extension, or

specify filename; Abiword infers file type from the extension.

Is there a way to get around this, and just get the output via stdout?